![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Coming as no shock to anyone
At least anyone who knows about version creep...
WotC has announced that D&D 5.0 will be out in 2013. And they want player input for suggestions.
Okay... *ahem*
1) Stop MMO-ing up the game. While on the surface, there was a substantial difference between a bow-and-arrow using Ranger and a Sorcerer, when it came down to damage-dealing, it ended up being almost exactly the same. Which was silly.
2) No more scaling costs on Raising the dead based on what level the target is. (Look, that was insanely stupid and you should know that.)
3) Stop with all the damage types. It had the side-effect of neutering certain characters if they happened to fight the wrong sort of monsters for their special effects. (Example: Warlocks, for instance, could be very powerful against certain types of monsters, and then almost useless if the GM happened to throw other things at them. Whereas several other classes didn't have that problem at all.)
4) Considering each race entry only took up two pages, don't wait until Player's Guide 2/3/14 to add races that should have been in the first book. I don't know if that pattern (2 pages per race) will continue, but the key point is getting across.
5) Too many rules, not enough background. Look, I just stopped running a Rules Cyclopedia (aka old school basic, mostly) D&D game, and in terms of rules, it. Was. Simple. (Side note: The only thing I hated to look up, rules-wise, was the grapple rules. They sucked.) Combat was fucking quick. I could run three or four combats a night, as opposed to 4.0, where by the time we hit 11th level, one combat could take an hour and a half, because there were so many fiddlin' rules.
6) In case it wasn't obvious from (5), MAKE. COMBAT. SIMPLER. Seriously, in some ways, Chartmaster was an easier combat system that 4.0.
WotC has announced that D&D 5.0 will be out in 2013. And they want player input for suggestions.
Okay... *ahem*
1) Stop MMO-ing up the game. While on the surface, there was a substantial difference between a bow-and-arrow using Ranger and a Sorcerer, when it came down to damage-dealing, it ended up being almost exactly the same. Which was silly.
2) No more scaling costs on Raising the dead based on what level the target is. (Look, that was insanely stupid and you should know that.)
3) Stop with all the damage types. It had the side-effect of neutering certain characters if they happened to fight the wrong sort of monsters for their special effects. (Example: Warlocks, for instance, could be very powerful against certain types of monsters, and then almost useless if the GM happened to throw other things at them. Whereas several other classes didn't have that problem at all.)
4) Considering each race entry only took up two pages, don't wait until Player's Guide 2/3/14 to add races that should have been in the first book. I don't know if that pattern (2 pages per race) will continue, but the key point is getting across.
5) Too many rules, not enough background. Look, I just stopped running a Rules Cyclopedia (aka old school basic, mostly) D&D game, and in terms of rules, it. Was. Simple. (Side note: The only thing I hated to look up, rules-wise, was the grapple rules. They sucked.) Combat was fucking quick. I could run three or four combats a night, as opposed to 4.0, where by the time we hit 11th level, one combat could take an hour and a half, because there were so many fiddlin' rules.
6) In case it wasn't obvious from (5), MAKE. COMBAT. SIMPLER. Seriously, in some ways, Chartmaster was an easier combat system that 4.0.
no subject
(2) Fix rituals. They were inserted into the game to fix the issue of wizards being able to do whatever they wanted with their lower-level spell slots, a noble goal, but rituals ended up so expensive that they were rarely used. There's got to be a better way.
(3) Ease up a bit on multiclassing. 3rd ed's multiclassing was a bit messy. It usually meant people just took one level of another class to steal good early abilities (or in the case of min/maxers, one level of five different classes). 4th ed's multiclassing feats were cleaner, but lacked the feel of true multiclassing, and hybrids were just not that good. Find a middle ground.
(4) Keep at-will powers. Yeah, the idea of giving everyone encounters and dailies didn't turn out that well, but at-will powers meant that melee characters had something to do besides "roll a basic attack" every turn, and it meant that wizards didn't have to carry around a stupid crossbow at level 1. If you ditch the power system, make a new type of feat that gives characters different basic attacks and give them a couple of those for free at the start of the game.
no subject
1) People like new things. That being said, there's something for having a limited number of things to do. Usually, the ones that can't figure out what to are the characters that haven't advanced slowly enough to learn their abilities well.
2) Rituals are good, but there also needs to be ways to have non-combat spells make an appearance without a huge time/money investment. Knock takes 10 minutes?
3) I liked 3rd multiclassing and they were on the way to fixing it with 3.5. Don't front load all the classes. Make them a bit more monk-like where the good stuff is spread out over several levels. I also toyed with the idea of single classed characters get 10% bonus XP, excluding prestige classes (but you'd lose the 10% bonus if you didn't go through at least half the prestige class/level your original class).
4) At will powers are nice. I did like the mage can magic missile all day long if he wants.
In addition, they need to realize that not every group is a hack and slash group. Yes, most are to a greater or lesser degree. But butchering the skill system from 3rd to basically just the combat related skills of 4th?
no subject
(2) Yeah, basically. Rituals were a fine idea but that needs a lot of tweaking.
(3) I really hate when Pathfinder players say that 4th edition has less opportunity to roleplay, and then they go, "So here's my character, a Fighter 3 / Barbarian 1 / Duskblade 4 / Rogue 2 / Two different prestige classes," which I can only imagine that they roleplay as characters with fear of commitment.
The other thing about 3.x multiclassing is that it screws over casters. At level 8, do you want to be a cleric who can cast level 4 spells, or do you want to be a cleric/fighter who can only cast level 2 spells? And by the way, you can only cast half as many level 2 spells as the full cleric can. There was very little reason for casters to multiclass in 3.x as a result.
(4) :p
(5) I think the skill system is really just as bad as it always was. I mean, saying that you just pick five skills and get max ranks of those instead of people min/maxing which skills they're taking at each level helped to streamline the system. It's more that D&D was NEVER a game with a strong non-combat system to begin with.
I think two things really happened here: One, Wizards thought that social/thievery/noncombat abilities would be relegated more to the utility powers that you get at 2nd/6th/etc., but no one wants to give up a potential combat power slot (for a heal or reroll, whatever) just for the chance to reroll a diplomacy check. So the combat and noncombat slots really need to be separated better.
Two, a lot of people are just pissed that wizards can't cast a spell anymore that does anything they want and win the game. Part of that is sourgrapes from overpowered wizards (seriously, fuck 3.x wizards, those self-entitled brats), and part of it is the failure of the ritual system.
Somewhere later in the set, like in the last martial power book or something, Wizards introduced a set of martial specialties or something, which worked just like rituals except for people without spellcasting. It was things that let you do great thievery or scouting skills where you paid money per skill. e.g. Pay a few gold to use great costume materials for a perfect disguise, or coat your hands in special material so that you could climb any wall. I think it'd be great if they improved on some of that stuff, except just make it feats or class features instead of making people pay for it each time.
And also, go download Legend. It's a free RPG that tries to mesh features of 3.x and 4th, and it has a great idea on how to make multiclassing work. I'd like to try that sometime.